Commentary

Scott Walker Undoes Decades of Women's History

By Susan Feiner

WeNews commentator

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Right smack dab in the middle of Women's History Month we've been treated to the spectacle of Wisconsin's new GOP Gov. Scott Walker taking apart public-sector workers' bargaining rights and women's labor gains in the process.

(WOMENSENEWS) Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's slash-and-burn approach to public sector unions--imitated by over a dozen Republican governors across the nation--is the political equivalent of slamming women's labor history into reverse. Right in the middle of Women's History Month.

While women represented 57 percent of the public-sector work force at the end of the recession, women lost the vast majority--79 percent--of the 327,000 jobs cut in this sector between July 2009 and February 2011, according to a January report by the Washington, D.C.-based National Women's Law Center.

Of course these job losses--and those still to come--have a bad ripple effect, leading to even more unemployment, spreading the pain far beyond the initially affected workers.

As public school class sizes get larger, as sports budgets are cut and afterschool programs eliminated, who will help with homework, coaching teams and organizing after-school activities?

These regressive budgets cut funds for home-heating oil assistance, help for the sight-impaired, street repair, water and sewage facility maintenance, nutrition programs and respite care. Not only will women have fewer options for paid work outside the home, the day-to-day work of family life will increase as well. Pressures on finances and family time will intensify. Expand. Explode.

Even today--after decades of employment advances for women--many men upon marriage free ride on wives' unpaid household labor. Having a husband increases a woman's domestic labor responsibilities by seven hours a week. Getting married decreases men's housework by an hour a week. This well-known pattern was confirmed in a 2008 study by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

Women Paying the Price

The attack on the public sector is a story of middle- and low-income women paying for the major misdeeds of a highly paid and male-dominated financial sector that has gotten away with major wrongdoing (see the Academy Award-winning documentary "Inside Job" for that vivid crime story).

Look around and you'll see predatory financial firms enjoying record profits for the stellar job they did in the period 2004 through 2007, setting up the economy for its worst crash since 1929.

The New York Times reported that in 2009 Goldman Sachs paid employees an average of about $595,000 a piece in bonuses. While employees at JPMorgan Chase collected a mere $463,000 on average. Boo hoo.

Meanwhile workers much more representative of U.S. overall--female and male, white collar and blue collar--watched their wages and hours decline.

We're also watching governors, following the lead of Walker, scapegoat public employees when the cause of state deficits--nationally now totaling around $112 billion--is the collapse of employment that drove down income and produced the sharp slide in home values.

Teachers and nurses and home-health aides did not cause this flood of joblessness.

When an asset bubble that large pops, so does state income. State tax collections, adjusted for inflation, are now 11 percent below pre-recession levels, while the need for state-funded services has not declined, the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported just a few days ago.